SOCIALISM UNAVOIDABLE
dare provoke the social convulsion that would
ensue upon a deliberate reversal of the engines
or upon any attempt to return to the glorious
days of big business, wild speculation and
mounting unemployment before 1927. They will
merely slow down the drive. For in the world
now all roads lead to socialism or social dissolu-
tion.
The tempo of the process is different in the two
continents ; that is the main difference between
them. It is not an opposition. They travel at
different rates but they travel towards an identical
goal. In the Old World at present the socialisa-
tion of the community is going on far more rapidly
and thoroughly than it is in America because of
the perpetual war threat.
In Western Europe now the dissolution and the
drive towards socialisation progress by leaps and
bounds. The British governing class and British
politicians generally, overtaken by a war they
had not the intelligence to avert, have tried to
atone for their slovenly unimaginativeness during
the past twenty years in a passion of witless
improvisation. God knows what their actual war
preparations amount to, but their domestic policy
seems to be based on an imperfect study of
Barcelona, Guernica, Madrid and Warsaw. They
imagine similar catastrophes on a larger scale—